In the meantime, I deleted the passion repo, deleted the neon svn skin, restarted and turned on debugging. I then reinstalled the repo and attempted to install the skin to no avail. I then downloaded the skin from the passion website and tried to install it via 'install from zip' within xbmc to no avail.

When I checked the debug log for the second install attempt I get an error as follows:

that is really strange, i was using the windows automatic update client, which was supposed to give me nightlies. Since I upgraded to the 'official' nightlies, I am able to install this skin via zip file (didn't try the repo)

Unfortunately, I've run into a mysq db error that I can't fix, which I posted here